The video game industry has faced significant challenges recently, with high-budget, ambitious titles failing to meet sales expectations and the live-service model proving less popular with consumers than publishers anticipated. In contrast, many of the recent major successes have emerged from new or smaller development studios.
In an interview with The Game Business, Konrad Tomaszkiewicz, formerly a key figure at CD Projekt Red and now leading his own studio, Rebel Wolves, shared his perspective. He suggests that an excessive focus on monetization often overshadows the creation of innovative entertainment in many high-budget games:
“The problem in this industry is sometimes that people who are opening companies are thinking [too much] about how to make money. That’s a really cold approach to games. You can’t create art like that.”
Tomaszkiewicz clarifies that this is not the philosophy at Rebel Wolves. He states that his team is committed to delivering surprises and aims to break away from past conventions, embracing risk-taking:
“I gathered people around me who love RPGs, and from the very beginning, we knew that we wanted to create story-driven, open-world games with some twists. Opening a new company to do exactly the same things as in the past is a problem, because we will feel like we are not evolving, or developing. That was really important for us as artists. We want to push the boundaries of AAA RPGs by adding risky things, which give you more immersion, more emotions, and a different feeling when you are playing.”
However, Tomaszkiewicz is not entirely pessimistic about the current gaming landscape. He sees a promising trend for creative games that prioritize player experience over pure profit, citing two specific examples:
“I think that this [idea] is progressing nowadays, because when you look at Dark, or Crimson Desert right now, these games are different. They are not a copy of other AAA games, but they deliver something quite fresh. And I’m very happy about that because I’m starting to feel like in the 1990s when I was playing on my 286 PC, or even on the Atari, where every game was different. Every game was some kind of unknown. We want to deliver a similar experience to people.”
What are your thoughts? Does he have a valid viewpoint on the industry, and are Dark: Expedition 33 and Crimson Desert examples of games that are not just rehashing existing formulas but are pushing boundaries?